Good Vanilla Forms Resources?

I know there are already a lot of discussions about this here, and I’ve read all of them. I absolutely love CSS Tricks’ integration of WordPress and Vanilla forums. I suppose the best way to learn how that is done is just to take a look at how Chris and Trademark did it here, which I plan to do. But I wonder if anyone can recommend some of the following;

* A good responsive starter theme for Vanilla
* A good list of tried and true plugins and/or approaches for integrating WP/Vanilla

I tried asking this on the Vanilla website, but the discussion was a little negative and shooting down the idea that the two could be integrated, or that Vanilla should be responsive.

Chris, I’d also like to know how you integrated the search to work between the two and whether or not you’re using a WordPress plugin to embed Vanilla or how you’re combining the two on the front end. All I see here is HTML that contains references to both.

I haven’t *actually* used bbPress yet, so it’s a little hard for me to straight up recommend, but it’s very likely that would be a better way to go. I’m in the early stages of thinking of getting these forums converted to that. I don’t like the Vanilla forums theming at all and there is no integration between these forums and the rest of the site. The search is just a google search engine.

@chriscoyier Wow, I didn’t realize that. Your work looks so seamless on the front end that I just assumed you had figured out some intuitive ways to integrate it on the back end.

Is the header, footer, navigation, etc coming from a WP query, or did you manually copy that markup into the Vanilla theme?

I’m brainstorming for a website that includes a blog and a forum, and I want everything to be as seamless as possible. It seemed to me that bbPress was generally considered sub-par, and that Vanilla was taking the lead. Maybe I should revisit bbPress.

I also liked the concept of Discourse at first glance, but then I realized that it doesn’t (yet) support theming and is actually a somewhat immature platform. Maybe that will mature in the next couple of years, though after looking closely at the architecture of the demos, I don’t have high hopes for it.

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